Aluminum foil recyclable advices by ablison.com? Aluminum Thrown Away and Never Recycled: We may be recycling more aluminum every year, but things could still be a lot better. According to the Environmental Defense Fund, Americans throw away so much aluminum that every three months we could collect enough scrap to rebuild the entire U.S. commercial airplane fleet from the ground up. That’s a lot of wasted aluminum. Globally, more than half of all the aluminum cans produced and sold every year are thrown away and never recycled, which means they have to be replaced by new cans made from virgin materials.

Aluminum foil is something many of us use (or overuse) when covering dishes of food, cooking, etc. But once you’re finished, can it be recycled? Cans, furniture and other products made from aluminum are very easy to recycle. In fact, aluminum and other metals are among the easiest items to recycle because they can be melted and turned back into new products almost indefinitely. It is highly energy and resource intensive to create new aluminum, so it is definitely worth recycling the metal whenever possible. One of the biggest departures from the “aluminum is easy to recycle” rule is aluminum foil.

If you’re recycling aluminum foil that you bought and used for storage, separate the foil from the paperboard box and corrugated tube before recycling. If foil is combined with other materials (such as in drink boxes, candy wrappers and yogurt tops) and can’t be separated, you’ll want to throw it away. Foil mixed with other materials is considered recycling contamination. Combine all sheets of foil into one ball. This will keep the material easily separated from other products, and also prevent it from blowing away (aluminum foil is a very light material). Find additional info at is foil recyclable.

While most recycled aluminum is in the form of cans, aluminum foil is technically recyclable, but there’s a catch: It needs to be clean — that is, free of food residue, as grease or food residue can contaminate the other recyclables during the recycling process. In part because of the issues with contamination, and the reality that most people are unlikely to rinse their aluminum foil before recycling it, some waste haulers will not accept aluminum foil for recycling; the damage soiled aluminum foil does to other recyclables can outweigh the benefit of trying to recycle the aluminum foil.

Recycling Aluminum Makes Use of a Valuable Commodity! According to the International Aluminum Institute, aluminum is infinitely recyclable. Of the 1 billion tons of aluminum ever produced, about 75 percent of that is still in use. Aluminum cans are by far the most valuable items in the municipal waste stream — the value of the recovered aluminum in 2011 more than covers the cost of collection and processing . Because of this, recycling aluminum cans helps to subsidize the collection of a wide variety of other recyclable materials. See extra info on https://www.ablison.com/how-to-recycle-aluminum-foil-and-is-it-biodegradable/.